6. The Art of Absence: The Practice of Contemporary Curating
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In fall 2016, ARTH 422: Contemporary Curating had the unique opportunity to curate an exhibition for the spring 2017 season at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Under the guidance of Jennifer Kennedy, our curatorial team of 12 students worked closely together to develop a theme, set out objectives, select art works from the Agnes’ Contemporary Collection, and organize an exhibition catalogue. The curator has gained a significant role with the emergence of Contemporary Art, which predominantly de-emphasizes the tangible object and relocates it to the idea. Whereas traditional concerns included style, mode, medium and ideology, contemporary artists express interests encompassing place making, world picturing, and connectivity. As a mediator between artists and audiences, the curator treats art as a verb: transforming a constellation of silent objects into a moving, illuminated, dynamic experience. Our process began with researching and developing a theoretical and applied understanding of a curator's role and contemporary curatorial practice. Our collaborative process involved investigations of ‘absence’ along with the affective, existential, and relational intensities that live beyond our perceptive abilities. As a team of 12, we collectively worked through the challenges of reaching an open audience, limitations of physical space, time constraints, and adapting to unforeseen complications. As curators, we worked to create an affective experience/dialogue that goes beyond the initial encounter of art and offer a space to bridge the gap between art and life. Our aim in the exhibition was to reassure the viewer that confusion is positive and welcome and encourages critical dialogue and thinking.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.019 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".